More on our gardening disasters

...short, it’s an attitude problem. Ever since we learned we have lead in our soil, the garden has been all about containment and management and safety and compromise. And none of those things say “fun.” I think the best gardening comes about through curiosity and joy. We should all be like little kids in the garden, excited to plant those seeds, out there every day to see how much they’ve grown. I remember one the first vegetables I ever planted in...

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Making New Drawers . . . Plus Rants . . . Plus Roland Barthes

...Once I got home from the lumberyard I set about installing the slides and making story sticks, which are pieces of scrap wood cut to the precise size of the final drawer and used as a guide for milling and sizing the final dimensions of the maple I had bought. In making drawers there’s a very, very small margin of error in terms of sizing. You have to be precise. https://youtu.be/jyMwR3jjtGg The next step was to cut the dovetails. I took a class...

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Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...le iris, half uprooting it. He turned, put the plant in place, pinched the soil up well around it and ran on as if it were nothing at all. In tilling the soil many a child “found himself.” In one school there was an Italian boy who just naturally could not help fighting. Though punished, he had a fight almost daily. All of a sudden he got interested in the work in agriculture and asked for a garden of his own. All the good land having been apporti...

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Steal this Book!

...s illustrations, project ideas, resources, and first person anecdotes from urban homesteaders across the country. Authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen happily farm in their Echo Park bungalow and run the urban homestead blog: www.homegrownevolution.org. By the way, that’s not us on the cover–those be models. Since we’ve just about given up on privacy here’s a photo of us on the right (by Caroline Clerc). And, for the record, we don’t have a modern...

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It Quacks Like a Duck

...of the line was an old comrade of ours, one of the proprietors of Petaluma Urban Homestead, who we know from Mr. Homegrown Revolution’s post grad school sojourn in the dull city of San Diego. In the ten years since we lost contact it turns out that our lives have taken similar paths, including the appreciation of Xtracycles and poultry. Except that the folks at Petaluma Urban Homestead have had the brilliance of exploring the world of ducks in add...

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